Imagine a girl you like putting a hand on your shoulder, looking into your eyes, saying some gentle word I don’t quite remember due to being mesmerized by those eyes, and you know what I did? I just looked back uneasily for a few seconds, then nervously took her hand off my shoulder, shook it a bit, released it and awkwardly smiled. (That even wasn’t her last attempt to make me happy against my best efforts ; ended bad anyway.)

There are many things further down the road to go wrong with attractive popular girls. 2 most catastrophic cases in my life are with those such as them.

Admittedly I’m the one who mainly failed them due to misunderstandings and passiveness, but when a girl (being all that popular) is used to boys being rather active and competitive and social, and then you are here just cause she happened to like your looks, this may end painfully, for you more than for her.

There are also cases from the post, only I may have noticed, just wouldn’t risk losing an existing good friendship for possible romance.

Exactly.

Yes, the thing is - it’s a choice.

I’d be using Gentoo if not for installing software being something you have to plan for.

In some sense this would even seem an advantage of Windows. (I know it’s the fundamental reason for many hangs and freezes, but the idea that a file is a lockable resource doesn’t seem that bad.)

Some even Paradox ones. One can waste many-many hours in CK:DV with Mappa Regnorum mod, for example. Though CK2 is more complex, it lacks the relative simplicity and clarity.

I’ve seen rats in rather expensive parts of Moscow.

Also bag clips break. A rubber band or a knot (one you sure you can untie).

I usually use “just tucking”, though.

Back then pick-up artists were still a major thing, so I learned and then had to unlearn all that bullshit.

Oh. Thank dear god I never tried.

However, things won’t get better if we’re treating young men as poor, helpless victims of society

They are usually victims of their own parents, who may have too differing behavior from what is common average (say, example 1) both asexual and thus treating nonverbal communication as something not very hard or important, and thinking that you’ll just learn it, or, example 2) too sexual, like, sorry, one of the parents being an ex-escort and thus their child incorrectly measuring the signals sent, or, example 3) both parents having grown with their mother only or with little attention from their father, thus again not learning the skills of communication for men, one can imagine other examples).

instead of treating them like, you know, men, and telling them to take responsibility for their lives and online habits

Responsibility is fine for most, not knowing what to do is a different matter.

You’re not a victim, because you still have the power to change yourself.

That’s a philosophical question. You may have noticed that what you eat and how you exercise physically and what news you hear and what people tell you all affect very much what you think and how. So whether you can consciously change yourself to some intended end is, again, a question.

Thank you for being reasonable.

Usually if something is as easy for another person as it is for you, then they’ve been as successful in it as you have. That’s all I have to say about your readiness to judge others with that implication that you are better.

Ah, actually visited that link of yours, clicked through one article and it does look good. The only catch is that I’m confident most people with such problems haven’t ever heard about this guy and his website.

There are conversations where the actuality matters, and there are conversations where the criteria matter, and there are also conversations where the dynamic matters. You mixed up this one.

I mean, everybody talking about someone else’s rosy worldview or otherwise playing a cynic is usually clueless.

And ones better than the current mainstream were pretty numerous.

Well, then the solution is abolishing the law making these loans so easy. It will make things easier for students themselves (only after a transient process, though, which itself is going to be hard - but that can be softened by, say, abolishing it gradually, for different categories of students).

I’m not from the US, I think I’ve heard that banks are obligated to give those loans with some characteristics?

It’s going to cost much less if getting a student loan becomes much harder, because universities still need people paying.

If anybody can get a loan, the cost becomes inflated.

Just a thought.

Actually makes sense.

Actually yes.

In my childhood it wasn’t very easy to find a licensed copy (TBF, even pirate copy sometimes), but demos would be distributed with magazines etc.

And after playing a demo which you like a licensed honestly bought copy becomes emotionally much better than piracy.

It was a working mechanism. For games which are not crap anyway.

Trying on 6GB. As a Linux user I usually don’t need more RAM, so haven’t added any yet.

and even years after AOL had its market share siphoned off by ISPs like Earthlink, those users continued to use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn’t retire my handle until the late 2000s.

In Russia ICQ played the same role for an IM (it’s the same OSCAR protocol), but it (I think owned by AOL too) killed itself by trying to lose alternative clients.

I used the official one for Windows only, but it was a more civilized age, and what they were breaking included clients for Java phones (it was not so rare to hear the ICQ notification sound in public transport), clients like QIP, Miranda, Trillian which were used by many people, clients for Linux and so on.

Then everybody moved on to Skype. It happened very fast, in a couple of months my buddy list went mostly red from mostly green.